How to make bones follow a deforming surface

Artistic Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi there !

I am seeking advice for my character. I don’t find any solution to attach the beard bones to the mesh and make it follow the deformation and rotation…
The best I found was to put a child of constraint on the beard bones and link it to a vertex group with some vertices near that bone. It works well until I rotate the character, then the bones start to rotate in different directions (each bones rotate in different ways)

I tried the Geometry Attribute on emptys, but then the rotations don’t follow.
And make the bones follow other bones with an armature constraint does not work because some of the mouth deformation are made with shapekeys.

So I’m kind of struggling here … Any idea ? :slight_smile:

Thanks !

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2

What are you trying to do? Do you want to control the beard with a bone for each beard strand?

3

If possible yes.
I would like to have a bone for each beard strand and have those bones follow the mesh.

4

A variation of your attempt might work.
For each strand: vertex parent an empty to the mesh (parent to three vertices close to the strand).
Then add a “Child of” bone constraint to the beard bone. Set the empty as target.

A bit of work to set up if you have many strands…

Here’s an example with a cube and three strands.

5

Hey thanks for the response unfortunatly the empty starts rotating when I move the main control of the character (the head or above).
I finally uses a hair system and match the position of the strands, now it works but I can’t move them as I want … too bad but that will be enough I guess.

Thanks anyway ! :slight_smile:

6

In my example the empties follow the mesh pretty good. But maybe it was a too simple example.

Did you parent the empty to the mesh using 3 vertices? If only one vertex is used, the rotation won’t follow the mesh rotation.

7

Yes I used 3 vertices but it still rotates.
It doesn’t rotate if I deform the mesh but when I rotate it with a higher bone then it rotates